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From: "Jonathan Lewis" <jonathan@jlcomp.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle.server
Subject: Re: log_buffer settings
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1999 08:58:30 +0100
Message-ID: <938419541.20161.0.nnrp-09.9e984b29@news.demon.co.uk>
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>Can you guess why so many "noted" authors and tuning experts mention
>this in their books?  How did this myth get started?

It originally appeared in the manuals.  In fact I think I will
risk contradicting Thomas Kyte (just a little bit) on this one.
I believe the 'redo log space request' figure is actually reporting
the number of times that space was not made available in the
log buffer - however (in full agreement with TK) it is usually the
case that the space cannot be made available because the buffer
has filled very rapidly and has to be written out to disc first.

In the days of Oracle 6, and slower hardware, I often saw example
where increasing the size of the buffer would reduce the number
of waits quite significantly - but still leave a handful of waits that
matched the number of log switches pretty closely.

>Over the years, I'm convinced that the top 3 Oracle tuning books are
>only 85% correct.

Optimist !!  Tuning books suffer from 3 main types of error.
    Ignorance - the author gets it wrong (sometimes because they read the
manuals)
    Omission - there's lots of stuff that doesn't get in because of lack of
space/time
    Aging - Oracle keeps moving on.

Most of the errors in most of the tuning books are due to
the fact that the product has changed since the book was
written, and a good suggestion for versions x.y.z is either
very stupid, or highly misleading for version a.b.c


Postscript:  I've just noticed on an 8.0.5 instance running
under NT 4.0 that Oracle reports the log buffer space as
64K from v$sgastat and 72K from Show SGA even though
v$parameter reports the setting in init.ora as the 8K set by
one of the Oracle suggested setups.


--

Jonathan Lewis
Yet another Oracle-related web site:  http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk

johnvue@gte.net wrote in message <37eed2c6.31162369@news.gte.net>...
>
>
>On Sun, 26 Sep 1999 14:00:04 -0400, Thomas Kyte <tkyte@us.oracle.com>
>wrote:
>
>>
>>reduce that log buffer size, get it back down into KILOBYTES, not
megabytes.
>>
>>increasing the log buffer will not help (and can in fact hurt).
>>
>>the redo log space requests are not waits for space in the redo log
buffer -
>>they are waits for space in the online redo logs themselves. (some
documentation
>>erroneously tells you to increase the log_buffer -- it is wrong,
increasing the
>>log_buffer -- as you have seen -- will have no effect on this).
>


